Health and Life Sciences, Environment and Planet, People and Machines, Security and Privacy, Culture and Heritage, Algorithms and Software... The impact of the digital revolution is being felt across all areas of society.

Guix is free software, developed under the auspices of the GNU Project by a growing community of enthusiasts and organizations: currently between 40 and 50 people contribute each month. It is used to reproduce software environments. Recently, the Inria Bordeaux – Sud-Ouest Research Centre, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin and the Utrecht Bioinformatics Center in the Netherlands decided to undertake a joint effort using this software. What do the three institutions have in common? They all use or have users of high performance computing (HPC) software, and in these institutions, and many others, the ability to reproduce experiments is a stringent necessity… Guix appears to be one of the solutions.

Cordelia Schmid, recognised as one of the worlds’ leading specialists in computer aided vision, heads up the Thoth project team at Inria’s Grenoble Rhône-Alpes research centre. Her research is dedicated to artificial vision, and more particularly the automatic interpretation of digital images and videos. She has made fundamental contributions in the field of representation of images and videos and in visual learning, allowing objects, and indeed actions and places, to be recognised by drawing on massive databases of images and videos. Her outstanding career in computer aided vision, spanning over two decades, has won her the Inria-Académie des sciences Grand Prize Award.

Winner of the Inria – Académie des sciences – Dassault Systèmes Award for Innovation, Marc Pouzet is a specialist in synchronous languages. His research concerns the design, semantics and implementation of programming languages to be used in embedded systems. Among other things, his research has led to the development of SCADE KCG 6, a language and environment used to make critical software for aircraft and trains.

Karthikeyan Bhargavan, an Inria director of research specialised in the security of data exchanges on the Internet, has just received the Inria Young Researcher Award. This latest award comes in recognition of his excellent knowledge of programming languages, Internet protocols and cryptography. He has followed an unusual career to acquire this interdisciplinary expertise.

In an ever evolving digital world, cyber-criminals never cease to devise new threats.

From critical infrastructure operators and administrations to large companies, SMEs and ordinary citizens: no one is safe. In order to deal with the evolution of these new threats, a new generation of tools is necessary to protect sensitive data and computer systems.

Jointly organized by Inria and Cispa, the first Franco-German academic-industrial conference on cybersecurity will take place on December 8, 2016.

This conference is organised in partnership with the Paris-Region The Systematic Cluster
Pôle de compétitivité
.

This event replaces the meeting of April 26 of 2016, cancelled because of SNCF strike.

The strategic partnerships that Inria establishes are long-term bilateral partnerships with large industrial groups, formalized in a framework agreement. A research program is developed jointly by Inria and its partner based on the industrial player’s proposed priority topics. Research projects, fitting into this program, are then developed jointly by Inria’s teams and the partner. In addition, a steering committee and a scientific committee ensure that the collaboration is consistent and runs smoothly.

1984: Inria becomes a shareholder in a first company, SIMULOG. It was the start of a history of company creation which is still going strong today! Today, and over the coming months, Inria is turning the spotlight on 30 years of exciting entrepreneurial ventures. It is an opportunity to remind ourselves that the creation of businesses is one of the areas Inria decided to focus on in its search for economic and societal impact. Interview with Antoine Petit, managing director of Inria and Eric Horlait, Inria’s deputy managing director responsible for transfer and industrial partnerships

Team presentation

In the increasingly networked world, reliability of applications becomes ever more critical as the number of users of, e.g., communication systems, web services, transportation etc grows steadily. MExICo works towards a better understanding and an increased reliability of distributed and asynchronous systems, and focuses its research on the two features of Concurrency and Interaction. The increasing size and the networked nature of communication systems, controls, distributed services et.c confront us with an ever higher degree of parallelism between local processes. For any form of analysis and control, a global view of the system state leads to overwhelming numbers of states and transitions, and blurs the mechanics that are at work rather than exhibiting them. Conversely, respecting concurrency relations avoids exhaustive enumeration of interleavings, and allows to focus on `essential' properties of nonsequential processes characterized by causal precedence relations. We see concurrency in distributed systems as an opportunity rather than a nuisance that leads to state space explosion in the formal models and slows down algorithms.

Research themes

Diagnosis and diagnosability. In diagnosis for discrete event systems, the task is to determine - from observations of streams of event labels - whether faults have occurred in the system under observation. Diagnosis algorithms have to operate in contexts with low observability, i.e., in systems that exhibit many events invisible to the supervisor. Checking observability and diagnosability for the supervised systems is therefore a crucial and non-trivial task in its own right. MExICo works on the following aspects:

Unfolding- based diagnosis

Observabilité et diagnosticabilité

Decentralized diagnosis

Test. Let an formal specification model M and an implementation I, that supposedly conforms to M, be given; I's behavior is influenced by the input streams received, and observable only via an output stream. Conformance testing consists in computing - whenever possible - input streams that allow to determine whether I deviates from M or conforms to it. MExICo's research is on testing for distributed asynchronous systems.

In local testing, several processes send test messages to their peers and observe locally the received response; the testing problem consists in determining global conformance from the local test results.

Controller Synthesis. In a distributed setting, we need to synthesize a distributed program or distributed controllers that interact locally with the system components. The main difficulty comes from the fact that the local controllers/programs have only a partial view of the entire system. It is essential to specify expected properties directly in terms of causality revealed by partial order models of executions (MSCs or Mazurkiewicz traces).

Adaptation and Grey box management. Contrary to mainframe systems or monolithic applications of the past, we are experiencing and using an increasing number of services that are performed not by one provider but rather by the interaction and cooperation of many specialized components. As these components come from different providers, one can no longer assume all of their internal technologies to be known (as it is the case with proprietary technology). Thus, in order to compose e.g. orchestrated web services, to determine violations of specifications or contracts, to adapt existing services to new situations etc, we have to analyze the interaction behavior of components known only through their public interfaces, thus semi-transparent and semi-opaque; we refer to them as "grey boxes". Three central issues emerge:

Abstraction

Composition

Adaptation

Fields of Application

Traffic security

Adaptation for web service composition

Telecommunication

International and industrial relations

EMoTiCon: Equivalences between Models with Time and Concurrency. Project of the Farman institute of ENS Cachan with LURPA (laboratory for automated production at ENS Cachan).

SMYLE: EGIDE/DAAD (Procope 2008/2009), with M\"unchen and Aachen, on bridging the gap between requirements, provided as a set of MSCs, and conforming design models.

Participation in European project Disc (distributed supervisory control of large plants) with academic and industrial partners in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic.